Digital Exclusion (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow three noble Baronesses, one after the other, and particularly wonderful to hear the passionate pleading from the Conservative Benches about the lackings of the present Government. At the same time, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, who chaired the committee admirably. I approach these bipartisan things with an open mind, to see just where I am being led by the nose. However, genuinely, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, encouraged views across the board, welcomed pertinent comments quite critical of the party she belongs to, and indeed gave voice to some herself. Her leadership—and we are talking about leadership—has been splendid. I need to have a cup of coffee with her and talk about other matters, but that is not for now. We were supported, of course, by a truly astonishing bunch of people in the secretariat, whose skills have been wondrous.

The noble Baroness began by simply saying what is incontestable—that technology is changing very quickly. Let us test that hypothesis. The report was published in June 2023. Eight months later, we are debating it and responding to it here in the Chamber. But on 7 August 2023, the newspapers, because of the astute handling of the report with the press and other communication outlets, picked up on the major themes in a very big way. I have in my hand an article that I clipped because it was so informative, principled and punctilious. It is an editorial in one of our leading newspapers, headlined: “Britain is isolating people who are digitally excluded and at a very high cost”, as many of us have said. But the fact is that the newspapers were saying it in August. The Government, and those who plan the use of our time here, have given us the last fag-end of a day’s business to look at this report, which contains important things that need to be heard, and with urgency.

I want to know what influence the Minister can bring to bear on those who are faced with the fact that we are not content with the lack of a strategy for 10 years. We need more focused leadership. Not only this report from the Communications and Digital Committee, but all our reports talk about the skills base that needs to be improved for the whole gamut of national life and our economy. We lament time and again, as we have in this report, that so much of what we look at throws responsibility on to one government department after another—education, business, communications and so on. No one seems to pull it all together, which is of course what a strategy would do. It would bring together the places where these needs are identified and forge a path that shows practically what can be done.

I was very taken by the comment from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, that we have never been so connected but not included. It has a lovely shade of meaning and nuance that bears thinking about—indeed, it could initiate a debate in its own right. It is wonderful to have my noble friend Lady Armstrong here. Not only did she recognise the need when she was in government, but she saw that something was done to address the need. Her words—that things can be done—also need to enter our soul and change our way of thinking and approach to these things. Technology is going to change at a terrible rate, and our legislation will never keep up with it, but we must be able to act in such a way that greater attention is given to the people who will be excluded by the very advances we will all praise.

When we were meeting, I was surrounded on the committee by people whose brains are not like mine and who can handle the intricacies of technology in a way that my poor Plato and Aristotle brain cannot. I have spent my whole life not running things, not organising corporations, nor being a political leader, but just being a pastor to people who live on ordinary streets and have their problems and so on. The most important part for me was the visit that we undertook to Newham, when we went to Skills Enterprise. We sat with people in a little hub as they talked to each other about their problems and showed each other how to manage a particular problem that each was faced with.

It has been mentioned that libraries offer hubs of that kind. Churches also offer hubs of that kind. It is very important that they use their space in this way. Ordinary people, dealing with ordinary problems, who feel more and more distant from the ability to solve, or even address, their problems, are helped through these street-level initiatives. Would that our corporations and the great institutions in our national life never lose sight of the plight of the ordinary person in this particular field.

I am delighted to step down from my membership of the committee—I know they will miss me terribly—and, with this blast from the past, I say: keep focused; this has to be done. I say to the Minister: please get a sense of the urgency of this and give us a little hope.

King’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a truth universally acknowledged that an Anglican bishop making her maiden speech in the House of Lords is likely to be able to cope with being followed by a Methodist. I was delighted to receive the honour of being chosen to speak at this moment, and I hope very much that we have just had a foretaste of the nature of the contribution to our debates by—as I must learn to call her—the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle. She has much to bring, and has hinted at some of it. She was the first woman priest to be ordained in England to become a bishop but, because this was before women bishops could be made in England, she found herself the Bishop of Waikato and Taranaki down in New Zealand. The ministry there, as has also been hinted at, crosses all the borders between the Māori, Polynesian and English populations, so leadership styles have been developed such as co-primates and co-diocesan bishops. A Church of England without hierarchy seems like an oxymoron. Still, for all that, it is marvellous to hear the tones that we will hear more of in future.

One final thing before I turn my attention elsewhere is that the noble Prelate—I cannot ever get it right: as a Methodist, one is just “the noble Lord”—is a trained and deeply thoughtful theologian, and I am looking forward to hearing the insights of the deep studies she has undertaken finding their way into giving colour to the policies that we adumbrate together in this House. She has a challenge and we are very grateful at the prospect of listening to the noble Lady the Prelate. Oh, for goodness’ sake: in the Methodist Church, we have sandwiches, while the Church of England has those fancy little cakes—it is the same with language.

I must turn from natural intelligence to artificial intelligence in the remarks I wish to make. We have just hot-footed it from our committee, and I need not go over the ground that has already been rehearsed by the feisty chair of our committee—the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—who has forged a terrific band of people asking awkward questions and bringing them to the Floor of the House eventually. Today, we had the pleasure, if it was that, of listening to top people from Meta and Microsoft, and we explored the various things that have already been mentioned in this debate. I do not want to fix my attention there; I just want to say what a pleasure it is to sit under her chairmanship and to be able to say so in this House. The more bipartisan things that we say about each other as we try to find our way forward, the better, it seems to me.

In the King’s Speech, there was just one sentence on the subject, was there not? It was:

“The United Kingdom will continue to lead international discussions to ensure that Artificial Intelligence is developed safely”.


It is “safely” that preoccupies me. In the National AI Strategy published by the Government, there are three bullet points. It is a 10-year plan, with forward thinking and long-term thinking. First, we must

“Invest and plan for the long-term needs of the AI ecosystem”.


That is easy to agree. Secondly, we must

“Support the transition to an AI-enabled economy”.


Again, I have no problems. Thirdly, we must

“Ensure the UK gets the national and international governance of AI technologies right to encourage innovation, investment, and protect the public and our fundamental values”.


That is, once again, the area of my concern.

I hope noble Lords will be patient with me if I refer to a conversation I had a number of years ago and that I shall never forget, with Joseph Rotblat, a nuclear physicist and very eminent man, holder of the Nobel Prize for peace. He escaped from Poland, although tragically he left his wife behind and she suffered in the way that so many others did. He was part of the Manhattan Project, developing nuclear physics for, as the scientists thought, the benefits of the world. There was a war on. He subscribed to continuing his research into the application of his science to the making of a bomb only because the story was that the Germans were producing a nuclear weapon themselves. When it turned out that they had abandoned their research, he resigned from the Manhattan Project and came back to Britain, to Liverpool, and began a series of conversations called the Pugwash conferences.

Those Pugwash conferences gathered together leading people in the field of nuclear physics who all had ethical concerns about the science they were doing and the application to which it was being put. In case anybody thinks that ethics is about something sentimental, romantic or non-substantial, let it be said that those Pugwash conferences led to treaties, bans, agreements for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, for the banning of nuclear testing and all the rest of it. Ethics has outcomes that are measurable, but this man, towering above his community, set the standard.

I had a cameo career on the Front Bench before Covid—as well as old age—destroyed that. However, during that time with DCMS, and on the committee since, I have been looking in the start-up companies and at people in the field that we have been talking to where they work, and as they come to be interrogated at the committee, in the hope of finding from within the science itself that authoritative voice that will help us poor lawmakers who take for ever to catch up with the science—although we never do—to set the tone and the direction. Rotblat did it for nuclear physics; who will do it for the technologies we are currently developing? The ethical side of things is the answer to what we heard earlier: the need for transparency and openness and to offer explanations to a public who are bemused. We long for that voice.

I come off the committee in January. I have had the privilege of engaging with ideas that are well beyond my competence, but I find at the heart of it the desire to get that voice that will set us off in the right direction: that authoritative voice from within.